Roughly 1970 - 74
A fair bit more stuff could be added.
Fine Art course at Epsom.
A traditional painting course – one of the only ones going on in the country at that time.
Tutors:
Leslie Worth
John Hacker
Geoff Broadway
Eric Rodway.
Learning how to paint in a catholic way. I worked on nudes and landscapes.
The latter started to become more significant due to my growing involvement with Shipping Hill.
I started going up there to paint with Tony Wright and Julian Pefanis: Two American painting students who weren't in Vietnam, we shaped each others learning quite profoundly.
Moon and bonfire.
Following a series of studies of ancient South American art.
A painting about the bonfires I used to make and sit by in the evenings outside my caravan at Shipping Hill, when the wood was particularly dry it would shoot up into the night sky becoming "sprites" on the way up.
I saw these as near enough symblolic of souls of different life forces. Maybe a little akin to how people light candles in churches.
We felt that painting was the one important creative activity and anything else simply got in its way. We spent time painting pictures together, the start of a lot of the work we made in London Surrey Arts a bit later on.
At that point in time "Art and Language" was just evolving: stating that painting was dead as a contemporary art form. We duly reacted against this, without realising that by doing so, we were re-evaluating everything we stood for.
The very goal of the enemy!
King Harvest has surely come.
In painting terms I was beginning to realise at this point that there was (or so I thought) a battle between the doodle and the representational – the subjective and the objective.
Spring Panel
Painted in my large room in a communal house in Tadworth,just outside the downs and racecourse, a truly beautiful place to live, maybe one of the happiest times of my life.
Our back garden in Tadworth through the conservatory window.
Stream Panels.
All the information came from the stream in Shipping Hill, I was especially interested in the eskimo type patterns formed on the surface of the water. I drew them all fro observation. I felt that useing camera images was cheating!
It was painted in my College studio in the Post Office Annexe overlooking Epsom Clock Tower which I shared With Nina Gieble and the pigeons
I started to move onto panels just before my final year, they seemed to carry my painting thought process very comfortably and still do on occasion, to this day.
The Bramble Panels
Painted in my caravan in Pembrokeshire during the summer holidays just before my final year.
They started off as just one panel which I painted over (to my regret) in order not to be too influenced by it on the whole set of work which was to be produced conjointly.
Many of the bramble leaves were painted out as white and then layered with colour, making it maybe a little cumbersome paint wise.
I was really intrigued with the patterns forming from the groups of leaves, something that obviously evolved from my hypnotic interest with carpets.
different clusters became different symbols, took on different meanings, represented different moods.
This came about during the time it took to paint them giving me time to daydream as I knitted it together.
Link to album of college work from Epsom:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150351267821424.401522.707526423&l=cb661437fa
